Feynman implies that psychology is a "cargo-cult" science where variations of experiments and assumed hypothesis are valued over scientific rigor or reproducibility. That's my guess too. See: misattribution of arousal studies, Millikan oil drop studies, Covid-19 and Didier Raoult Livre with hydroxychloroquine... etc. etc.

Edit: The article states B.F. skinner did create a box to remove these side-channel effects for rat experiments

Math and hard science have political and cultural biases and inertia as well. At a minimum, hard science is still manipulated by justifying funding.

And then there's this: https://esoterx.com/2014/12/03/murder-by-math-the-irrational...

There was institutional pushback on Godel's incompleteness from the axiomatic mathematicians that thought they could prove everything as they reconstructed math from axioms (if I understand that). From what I recall reading the axiomatic reconstruction was basically a huge industry of mathematical work, and suddenly some pissant young guy shows up and says "yeah, that not going to end the way you hope".

The mechanism of tenure alone will lead to political grandstanding. If your research is borderline on tenure but some other research completely undermines it, that is millions of lifetime dollars on the line.

See: MOND vs Dark Matter, string theory, etc.

> why haven't others attempted to remove side channel information as they perfected their experiments

How do we know they haven't?

The replication crisis represents decent evidence that this kind of thing is still a major problem today.

I’d consider that a broad label covering all sorts of situations rather than a smoking gun. To replicate the paper I’m currently reading you’d need to source or rebuild some really shitty 1970s tech and then ignore decades of thinking around the domain. It’d be a waste of time.